Category Archives: Game Development

For A Dragon Named Coal in Unity, I needed an optimized way of exploding crates, windows, enemies, and other common items. Here I’m going to give a quick overview of how we accomplished the GIF effect above in an optimized fashion.

After a long period of development, I’m proud to announce a free playable web demo for A Dragon Named Coal. I’m a founder on the game with my wife. I serve as the project’s lead developer and writer. Enough said though, go play the game and let me know what you think. Also please vote for us on GameJolt if you want to support this project.

Building a video game in the wild west of HTML5 programming is no easy task. I’ve had many difficult problems with my HTML5 game A Dragon Named Coal through Clever Crow Games. How do you build a game CMS, distribute to several systems quickly, and find the resources you need to keep moving forward. Being involved in San Francisco’s Meetup.com scene I’ve met several other HTML5 game developers struggling with the same issues. To try and help unite these developers to create better games, I’ve started the San Francisco HTML5 Game Developers Meetup group.

Managing characters stats, lore, story, dialogue, and other recurring video game components is quite a task. Even with popular game engines such as Unity 3D, Game Maker Pro, and RPG Maker all lack a robust solution to solve these issues. That’s where Articy: Draft comes into play its a full blown CMS for video game development. Below I’ve documented my findings on this software so you can figure out if its right for you or not.

Over the past couple months I’ve spent most of my time working on a tile based game with gigantic fighting robots. Initially I tried to find movement tiles and paths with a brute force search. But it was quite buggy, instead I ended up using the A* (A Star) Pathfinding Algorithm for my tile game. To learn how it worked I built a fully interactive A* demo that you can play with.